Vegetable Monsters, Triffids, and Agriculture

Triffids: vegetable monsters are curiously disabled and humanized as this quotation from Chapter 2 demonstrates:

"When it "walked" it moved rather like a man on crutches. Two of the
blunt "legs" slid forward, then the whole thing lurched as the rear one
drew almost level with them, then the two in front slid forward again.
At each "step" the long stem whipped violently back and forth; it gave
one a kind of seasick feeling to watch it. As a method of progress it
looked both strenuous and clumsy—faintly reminiscent of young elephants
at play. One felt that if it were to go on lurching for long in that
fashion it would be bound to strip all its leaves if it did not actually
break its stem. Nevertheless, ungainly though it looked, it was
contriving to cover the ground at something like an average walking
pace."

But popular interest in vegetable teratology is not new. Some time ago I purchased a copy of M. C. Cooke's Freaks and Marvels of Plant Life; or, Curiosities of Vegetation (1882). While some critics have suggested that there was a clear separation of science, wonder, and religion by the middle of the eighteenth century, it is significant that this book was published under the direction of the London Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

Also noteworthy is its opening statement that 'The Labours of Mr Darwin in this direction deserve to be more generally known than they are.' (p. 1). Chapter 2 opens with a detailed discussion of CARNIVOROUS PLANTS.

Plant swallows a bird

And here is another discussion of this topic from an 1829 Encyclopaedia:

Monsters, Vegetable. Monsters
are more common in the vegetable than in the animal kingdom, because
the different juices are more easily deranged and confounded together,
and because the methods of propagation are more numerous.

Leaves are
often seen, from the internal parts of which other leaves spring forth;
and it is not uncommon to see flowers of the ranunculus, from the middle
of which issues a stalk bearing another flower.

M. Bonnet informs us
that, in certain warm and rainy years, he has frequently met with
monsters of this kind in rose-trees. He saw a rose, from the centre of
which issued a square stalk of a whitish color, tender, and without
prickles, which at its top bore two flower-buds opposite to each other,
and totally destitute of a calyx; a little above the buds issued a petal
of a very irregular shape. Upon the prickly stalk, which supported the
rose, a leaf was observed which had the shape of trefoil, together with a
broad flat pedicle. He also mentions some monstrous productions which
have been found in fruits with kernels, analogous in their nature to
those which occur in the flowers of the ranunculus and of the rose-tree.

He has seen a pear, from the eye of which issued a tuft of thirteen to
fourteen leaves, very well shaped, and many of them of the natural size.
He has seen another pear which gave rise to a ligneous and knotty
stalk, on which grew another pear somewhat larger than the first.

The
lilium album polyanthos, observed some years ago at Breslaw, which bore
on its top a bundle of flowers, consisting of 102 lilies, all of the
common shape, is well known.

These vegetable productions which are so
extraordinary, and so contrary to the common course of things,
nevertheless present deviations subject to particular laws, and
reducible to certain principles, by distinguishing such as are
perpetuated either by seed or by transplanting, from those which are
only accidental and passing.

Monstrosities which are perpetuated exist
in the original organisation of the seed of the plant, such as marked or
curled leaves.

The word monster is more properly applied to
those irregularities in plants which arise from frequent
transplantation, and from a particular culture, such as double flowers,
&c. but those monstrosities which are not perpetuated, and which
arise from the accidental and transient causes deranging the primitive
organisation of the plant, when it comes to be unfolded, from a
superfluity or scarcity of juices, a depravation of the vessels
contributing to nutrition, the sting of insects, or contusions and
natural grafts, retain also the name of monsters.

Of this kind are knobs
or swellings, stunting, gall-nuts, certain streaks, and other similar
defects. One species may be compared with another; but a monster can
only be put in comparison with an individual of the species from which
it comes. See the Observations Botaniques of M. Schlotterbec, of Basil,
concerning monsters in plants.